Tracking "A Son of the Forest": William Apess, Pequot

William Apess (1798—1839) published several important works, including an autobiography, and is rightly regarded as one of the founders of Native American letters. But he accomplished more. During the War of 1812 he fought for the United States on the New York/Canadian front. As a Methodist minister he traveled throughout the Northeast preaching to Indigenous, "colored" (that is, African American or mixed race), and white people. He assumed leadership of the Mashpee tribe's fight to abolish state guardianship of their lands on Cape Cod, successfully argued their case to the Massachusetts legislature, and published an account of their struggle.

Next, Apess delivered a popular Eulogy on King Philip in which he argued against the traditional filiopietistic reading of King Philip's War (1675–1676) to which the Puritans' descendants still adhered. He published this effort and continued to speak out on Native American rights in New York City and as far south as Washington, D. C. Then, at the age of forty-one, on the cusp of an even greater role in behalf of Indigenous people, in a lower Manhattan boardinghouse Apess died of "apoplexy"—what, in his biography of Apess, Drew Lopenzina identifies as "a textbook case of appendicitis" (p. 248).

Since the republication of Apess's writings twenty-five years ago, many scholars have investigated his life and work; a book-length biography appeared just two years ago.¹ What does Lopenzina add to the record? He unearths some important facts. Apess first delivered his Eulogy on King Philip in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1835 and not in Boston in 1836, as we had thought (p. 221). In 1831, when Apess was living in Groton, Connecticut, and ministering to the Pequot, a white man broke into his home and severely beat him, an example of the period's sometimes-violent race relations (pp. 184–5). Apess was ordained in the Protestant Methodist Church on August 8, 1831, and not in 1829, as we had thought (p. 187). That same year he published a hitherto-unnoticed essay on the Indians' relation to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel (p. 178).

Lopenzina provides other interesting information. A Methodist circuit rider recalled visiting the Pequot in the early nineteenth century and heard a young "lad [undoubtedly Apess] about twelve or fourteen years of age," who "arose and exhorted sinners to repentance, in the most pathetic manner" (p. 75). An Englishman recorded in his memoir that, travelling from Ohio to New York in 1833, he approvingly read Apess's ("a converted Indian[s"]) autobiography, an interesting hint regarding how widely it circulated (p. 175). Combing newspaper databases, Lopenzina amplifies our knowledge of when and where Apess preached and lectured. And abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who approvingly reported Apess's activities in his Liberator, organized a fundraiser (featuring the "Garrison Juvenile Choir") for the benefit of the Mashpee delegation when they came to Boston to present their case (p. 216).

Lopenzina follows the familiar trajectory of Apess's life outlined in his Son of the Forest (1829, rev. 1831) and The Experiences of Five Christian Indians (1833), now amplified by many scholars. The author believes, however, that he offers something more, a "cultural biography." What does this mean? Given the paucity of first-hand sources on Apess, Lopenzina "labored in some manner to imagine his life, his travels, and the impressions that the world must have made on him" and as well used him "as a lens through which to view the dynamics of Native lives in the Northeast," viewing him, in other words, as someone whose experience is representative (pp. 6–7). Such biography is most convincing when one carefully toes the line between factual information and informed speculation. Each reader will have to decide how well Lopenzina succeeds at this balancing act.'

The author assuredly corrects and extends the historical record. Restricting himself to ascertainable facts...